On Jan 11, 2012, at 19:30, Carlos Mennens <carlos.menn...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 11, 2012 at 7:13 PM, David Johnston <pol...@yahoo.com> wrote: >> However, I will say again, you DO NOT WANT TO ACTUALLY DO THIS! >> >> The specific issue is that some US Postal Code begin with a zero ( 0 ) and >> so whenever you want to the zip_code value you need to pad leading zeros if >> the length is less than 5. Now consider that a full zip_code can be in 5+4 >> format with an embedded hyphen and you no longer can even store it as >> numeric. If you deal with Canada (and maybe Mexico) at all then spaces and >> letters become acceptable characters within the zip_code. > > David - Thank you for that great info / explanation. Very informative > and helpful. I was not required to make this change but rather just > goofing off attempting to learn SQL as I'm rather terrible at it. Can > you tell me if there's an organized cheat sheet or something > documented in regards to data types commonly used for commonly used > field association? I think that's great for people who can't look at > the documentation and clearly understand specific definitions or > assumed categorization based on the type definition. If you can perform reasonable arithmetic on the field value you encode it as a number otherwise you should use text; even if the only possibly valid values are numbers. David J. -- Sent via pgsql-sql mailing list (pgsql-sql@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-sql
